The Crippling Costs And Zero Benefits Of Net Zero
Image: Zero Carbon World
The International Energy Agency (IEA) published a special report last week, setting out its proposals for achieving ‘Net Zero’ carbon emissions. One of its headline demands is that gas-fired domestic boilers should no longer be sold after 2025.
This echoes one of the main policies in the UK government’s Net Zero plan. This is no coincidence.
National governments, including the UK, draw all of their climate policies from faceless global agencies like the IEA (as well as domestic quangos like the Climate Change Committee).
This process leaves out one important constituency: the public.
A ban on gas boilers will impose serious costs on ordinary people. A backlash is highly likely. You might think the practicalities of the policy would be of interest to journalists and the media.
But journalists have taken the IEA’s proposals at face value, and have mainly reported them without scrutiny.
Take the BBC’s Matt McGrath. ‘To keep the world safe, scientists say that global heating has to be limited to 1.5°C by the end of this century,’ he writes on the BBC News website. ‘The IEA’s new study sets out what it believes to be a realistic road map to achieve that aim.’
There is no skepticism about the proposals, no consideration of their consequences, or even any questioning of why we should take orders from technocrats about how to live.
An excited Andrew Evans Pritchard, the Telegraph’s business correspondent, also reproduces the IEA’s claims uncritically. ‘Net Zero does not cost jobs: it replaces five million lost in oil, gas, and coal with eight times as many… It does not raise energy costs: it cuts the average bill for households.’
This is bonkers, to put it mildly.
When policies face no challenge from the media, they are much more likely to be taken up by governments. But when they inevitably go wrong, none of their advocates will be held accountable.
It is worth reiterating what a ban on gas boilers means for the British public. Around 23.8 million homes are connected to the gas grid, which they depend on for heating and hot water.
Another one million homes depend on heating oil. Just 1.7 million homes depend on electric heating – mainly flats and some rural properties.
The reason gas is so prevalent is that it is abundant and cheap. This makes it a far more useful source of energy from the consumer’s perspective.
Gas costs around a quarter of the price of electricity per kilowatt-hour. And so, unsurprisingly, the total energy delivered by the gas grid is around four times that delivered by the electricity grid.
But the public’s need for cheap, reliable energy is not compatible with the Net Zero agenda. As part of the transition, some 25 million homes will have to be ‘upgraded’.
This will require gas combi boilers – which are small enough to fit in a kitchen cabinet – to be replaced by an air-source heat-pump unit, including a large ‘buffer’ tank.
These new units will take up roughly the space of a large cupboard. Due to the lower operating temperature of air-source central-heating systems, radiators will have to be replaced with units that are twice the size as well.
Connections to the radiators will also have to be replaced with larger diameter pipework.
All of these ‘upgrades’ will leave people with far less space in their homes.
Official estimates of the costs of heat pump installation vary from £8,000 to £16,000, depending on the size of the property.
And these figures do not include all the extra insulation that is needed to make air-source heat pumps viable (which will likely be required by other Net Zero legislation in any case).
New and ratcheting energy-efficiency standards will likely force homeowners to pay for these expensive retrofits before they can legally sell their houses.
See more here: climatechangedispatch.com
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Greta Jansen
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I see your headlines flash in the corner of my screen but unless I am very quick to click on them I am unable to get the article and read it. Is there a setting I need to change? I would like to receive all your articles.
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very old white guy
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It is a physical impossibility to have a zero carbon world as we live on a carbon based planet inhabited by carbon based organisms. Is everybody nuts?
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very old white guy
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what do they plan to use to build all the stuff they say is needed to upgrade homes? Right, fossil fuels. idiots, each and every one.
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James
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A return to democracy is well overdue. Why should unwelcome policies be enacted, even if their end is “good”, “saving the world” or whatever other myth, if the people don’t want them? Do we need to be a laughing stock for future generations, just like the Mayor and Council of Hamelin, hoodwinked by the Pied Piper? Under it all, there’s the idea that the End justifies the Means. But surely that that End must be reached, and no other more damaging result. Who guarantees?
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Herb Rose
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Has it become a requirement that in order to work for a government you must be completely stupid and disconnected from reality? Makes you miss the old days when government workers were just lazy and grossly incompetent.
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RT
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Carbon Zero = no civilization. No power= no heat. No Food production. No way to pay for the electricity if generated. The UK can just about keep the power on due to the French IC. Never mind that to upgrade the whole country is not affordable even now. They keep listening to the unicorns with the fairy dust on “utopia”. Just wait till it’s goes BOOM! God help us all.
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Andy
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The French Interconnector can provide a maximum of 3 gigawatts. The Uk daily demand is between 30 and 45gw.
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Charles Higley
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You have missed the point that they do not want you to live at all, period. No people, no need for anything, no pollution, etc. Bill Gates is their hero.
And the French will power UK Parliament just fine, and all their friends and family. The people should be fine with that while sitting in the dark cold.
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THOMAS W ADAMS
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All of what you say will come to pass, but not in the way you expect. There is a big elephant in this room and it is being neatly airbrushed from the public’s perceptions.
This is a fact; The Earth in it’s great celestial orbit, for about the last one thousand years, has reached the location where it always, unavoidably, experiences an “Ice Age”, and science predicts this next one is imminent, like, very soon. Mean-while the World is being misled by dire predictions of Global warming, yet, around the Globe, we are seeing unprecedented periods of winter like conditions, out of season and quite severe.
When this “Ice Age” sets in populations around the World will be forced to seek warmer climes; food crops will be severely affected; power generation will fail; housing and accommodations will be inadequate; World populations will shrink drastically.
Can you see the correlations and connections twixt what “they” are actually doing to us now, and the forced circumstances that will prevail, as an “Ice Age”predominates?
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Saighdear
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Yes we know it’s all bonkers. But as long as the pblic keep voting in such idiots – and in even greater numbers, what to do? Recent elections in UK: London Mayor returned, SNP returned, Tories behind Doris returned ( But who / what else to vote for in reality: not much choice )
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